Xerxes (Serse) by Georg Frideric Handel [1738], anon libretto (adapted from Sivlio Stampiglia’s libretto for Bononcini’s opera of 1694), translated into English by Nicholas Hytner.

Touring Production by Opera Theatre Company, given at the O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin on 14 February 2009.

Cast: Imelda Drumm (Xerxes), Mark Chambers (Arsamenes), Natasha Jouhl (Romilda), Rebekah Coffey (Atalanta), Alison Cook (Amastris), Giles Davies (Ariodates) & Brendan Collins (Elviro).

Ensemble (led by Anita Vedres) conducted from the harpsichord by Andrew Synnott.  Directed by Michael Moxham.

Feature in The Irish Times (including cast photos)

Hats off to OTC for an excellent production of Xerxes, which is now on a national tour.  Do see this if you can – everything is good!

Using the translation that Nicholas Hytner made for ENO in 1985, I actually preferred this to Hytner’s production (available on DVD) with all its chair-moving and so on.  Befitting our lean times, here OTC dispenses with the chorus, and the action is accompanied by just a string quartet + harpsichord, much as would have been the case in smaller theatres of the time.  Keeping the action focused on the seven characters (who only appear on stage together for the final scene) reminds you of how concentrated Handel’s dramaturgy can be, hinting not so much at a return back to classical unities as instead a look forward to something else entirely.  Having read somewhere of how Handel himself probably re-drafted some of the libretto to Rodelinda, it’d be interesting to see how his Serse libretto differs from Stampiglia’s original of 40 years earlier.  I think there’s still a lot to be learned about 18th century theatre.

One area they didn’t skimp on was costuming and an interesting artistic decision on the director’s part was to set Xerxes in the Napoleonic era (a great time for men’s fashion).  I didn’t get around to reading the director’s note until the interval, so I instead thought that they’d set it in the 1770s/1780s, just a generation after Handel, which got me thinking, perversely enough, of Rosenkavalier, of all things….